Josep Marco-Pallarés

I graduated in Physics (2000) and Psychology (2010) and obtained my PhD in Neurosciences from the University of Barcelona in 2005. After three years of post-doctoral stay in the Otto von Guericke Universität of Magdeburg (Germany), I was awarded with a “Ramón y Cajal” contract and joined first the Bellvitge Biomedial Institute (IDIBELL) and then the Department of Cognition, Development and Educational Psychology of the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Barcelona. From 2013 I am Associate Professor at this department and researcher at the Institute of Neurosciences of the UB. I have published over 70 manuscripts in international journals with more than 3500 citation and I have been the Principal Investigator of different research projects.

Research interests

My research work is aimed at achieving a better understanding of the human reward system. In concrete, I am interested in studying brain oscillations, as they are the key mechanism responsible for the coordination of the different areas of the fronto-striatal reward network. By combining functional Magnetic Resonance Magnetic Imaging, Electroencephalography and reinforcement learning computational models, our group has been able to describe the functional role of oscillatory mechanisms in reward processing, with special interest in the study of different types of pleasurable stimuli. In particular, I am interested in the study the neural mechanisms underlying musical pleasure and individual differences in musical reward processing, including the study of people with specific musical anhedonia.